Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

“Hello,” I said.

His father gave me a nod.

The boy tapped his light bulb against the carriage window.

“Be careful with that,” his father said.

I wondered why the boy had a light bulb, why he was not at school. Where was he going with his father, was the light bulb new or burnt out. The boy tapped the light bulb against the carriage window.

His father glared. “Leon,” he said sternly.

The boy sighed. “Yes, Pop.”

A boy named Leon, carrying a light bulb through New Jersey.

I rang the hospital from the station in Paterson.

“Can you please connect me to Katia Termen?” I asked the switchboard operator.

“Who?”

“Katia Termen. She is a nurse.”

“You mean Catherine Termen?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask who is calling?”

“This is Mr Termen.”

“Just a moment, please.”

Katia answered the telephone in English. She said “Hello” in an elongated way, rising. I scarcely recognized her voice.

“Hello?” I said back.

“Yes?”

“It’s Lev.”

I told her I was in Paterson. She was not friendly or unfriendly. I said I had come to see her.

“When?” she said.

“Tonight?” I said.

“Lev, I can’t. There is a shower tonight for one of the other girls.”

We were speaking in English. “Before, then?”

There was a short silence. “At lunchtime, maybe, I have some time.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“Come to the sanatorium.”

“All right.”

“Wait outside.”

“Outside the sanatorium.”

“Yes, Valley View,” she said.

“What?” She had pronounced valley like velly .

“Valley View.”

“ Velly View?”

“Valley View!” she shouted, angry.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you,” I said.

I met her outside Valley View, a little after one o’clock. It was a small tuberculosis hospital. There was a measured lawn, empty flower beds. A thousand suspended leaves, red and brown, like old ornaments. A single path led past the gate, through the centre of the grass. A patient drooped in a wheelchair. I looked away. I sat on a bench. The path was made of the sort of dusty gravel that coats your shoes, turns the cuffs of your trousers to parchment. A carriage rattled past, horse kicking up powder, and I imagined my face caked in a thin layer of dust.

Suddenly Katia was standing before me, hands at her sides, in perfect whites. I felt my heart jerk.

I stood. I greeted my wife.

She did not seem to have changed. Her upturned chin and long legs, an oval face like the image on a cameo. A mouth small and elegant. Brown hair, shorter than I had ever seen it, still parted to the right. She had always been small; she was even smaller in her uniform. Slender, compact at the shoulders, a thin belt in a ring at her waist. She was twenty when we were married, ten years ago. Now there were lines around her eyes. These eyes were clear, soft, unlaughing. They matched the season.

She smelled of washing powder and vinegar but also of herself, in a memory I could not place. Snow, books, a new cardigan.

Something twinged in my jaw. I tried to think of New York City. I lifted my head. “If it isn’t ‘Catherine,’ ” I said, in English.

Katia shook her head. “You just show up at the train station?” Her voice was as thin as paper. “Why couldn’t you call first? You appear. Just like a ghost. I have a job, Lev. I do not have your life — your luxury life. My one break in the day, and here I am meeting you.”

“I’m sorry, I …” I trailed off.

“Well, what is it? What’s wrong?”

I swallowed. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“Then why are you here, waiting outside a gate?”

“I …” I swallowed again. I turned to gaze back through the gate. “The hospital looks like a very good place to work.”

“It is not a hospital; it is a sanatorium,” Katia said. She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. She wore two slim bracelets at her wrist. One of them I had given to her, ten years ago. The other I did not recognize. She muttered something to herself, then lifted her eyes to me. “Well let’s walk at least.”

We set off side by side, and within this parallel movement, strange and familiar, I suddenly glimpsed her wedding ring. There, on her right hand. I stuffed my hands into my pockets. I looked not at her, but up toward the hill. I wished I had brought her something: a flower, a box of chocolates. I had brought her just my bare hands.

Later we were in the rising grass. The conversation was rote: questions about weather, health, family.

“And your brother?” I asked.

She seemed so brittle. “Sasha? You don’t even keep in touch with Sasha?”

“Not in a little while.”

“A little while?” She snorted. “Two years? Three?” It had been four. “I knew you were not writing to our friends, to my parents; but Sasha— he’s a scientist .” She said the word mockingly, as if it were the title of a lord. “You’re so busy now that you can’t even dictate a letter to one of your colleagues?”

I cleared my throat. “It is not like that.”

“What’s it like, Lyova?”

I looked at her. She was being deliberately cruel. I didn’t blame her. “Tell me how is Sasha.”

“He is all right.” She took a breath. “Everyone is all right. Just all right. It is a bad time, Lev.” She sighed. “You hear stories. The letters feel sometimes like they are being written onto — no, from on top of ice.”

“Not for people like Sasha, surely.”

She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “There are several reasons I do not go back to Russia.”

I looked at the earth. “Yes.”

“And you?” She gazed at me from under her brown lashes.

“Are you going home?”

“To Leningrad?”

“Yes.”

“I am staying for now,” I said. “I have a great deal to do. Contracts. Inventions. New work every week. Many meetings.”

“One of the doctors bought a theremin. He said it was completely impossible.”

“Yes, it can be challenging. You must be deft.”

“He is a surgeon.” She giggled, folded her arms. “He said it was like eating a pie with a shovel.”

“These days we are moving on from the theremin to other things.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Different kinds of sensors based around the electromagnetic resistance of the body, sometimes configured in sequence.” She showed no interest. “Or in conjunction with geothermal readings; I am experimenting with naval applications and also aircraft. So long as you understand the principles, there are infinite ways to implement them.”

Levelly: “You must get to see a lot of the country.”

“There are many, many meetings. Lunches at the Rockefeller Plaza and the Empire State. NYU, MIT, Columbia.”

“You’re still in midtown?” she murmured.

“Four storeys, and the basement.”

She made a thin smile. “The dorm is scarcely big enough for Judy and me. Only one of us can be in the kitchen at a time. If she is making her lunch I have to wait on my bed for her to finish. It’s funny. Sometimes I pretend she is my servant. ‘Judy, some toast!’ ”

“I have a very large kitchen,” I said. “Do you know Tommy Dorsey?” She showed me she did; in a small way I was surprised. “He comes to dinner parties sometimes. And George and Ira Gershwin. We all just crowd around with the girls, laughing, cooking.”

“ ‘With the girls.’ ”

We had passed into some woods and began climbing a slope. In spite of the incline we were pretending that we were just strolling. Katia was a little ahead of me now. With the girls . These words hung in the air. I had known they would hang in the air, before I said them, but I said them anyway. It was as if I wanted to bring us to a particular tree, to look again at an engraving we had carved there.